Virgin Heat(58)

"Why?" insisted Lucca.

"Why what?" said Funzie mildly.

"Why the fuck hasn't he?"

"Tommy, if he called, I could tell you why he called. If he doesn't call, I really got no way a knowing why he doesn't call."

"He looking for a fucking beef or what?"

"He's not looking for a beef. He has a lot on his mind."

"Well he's finding one. He's finding one but good."

Funzie took another bite of biscuit, brushed crumbs from the corner of his mouth. "Am I hearing a threat here, Tommy?"

Only then did Lucca realize he'd been moving to the brink of war. He pulled back half an inch. "Time is money and rat shit isn't raisins. Y'unnerstand me, Funzie?"

Gallo looked out the window, wondered if the rain would harden into sleet in time for rush hour. "Not really," he admitted.

Lucca, pacing in his study, looking out the window at Haitian gardeners on their skinny knees, tending to his flowers, had a brainstorm. "Hey, why the fuck don't you call him? He's staying at the Flagler House hotel."

"Under what name?" Funzie said.

"How the fuck should I know?" Lucca said.

"Well, how the fuck should I know?" Funzie asked in turn. "I didn't even know he wasn't coming home."

Air hissed through Lucca's teeth and whistled through his mismatched nostrils. "So you're telling me I gotta drag myself down there and find him?"

"You don't gotta do anything," said Funzie. "What I think you oughtta do is find some tweezers, pluck the hair outa your ass, and sit tight for a day or two."

"A day or two," said Lucca. "While he finds a way to screw me."

"If he was screwing you," said Funzie, "I'd know about it."

"I sit tight a day or two and he does what he wants."

"Yeah," said Funzie. "He does what he wants. I don't see what the problem is with that."

Lucca put on the squeezed face and singsong voice of a man who knows damn well he's being lied to. "Innocent," he said. "So fucking innocent . . . Tomorrow, Funzie. I don't hear something by tomorrow, I'm going down there."

"Suit yourself," said Paul Amaro's number two.

"Don't say I didn't give you notice."





35


Finding Ziggy proved, of course, to be far more complicated than Carmen Salazar had thought.

He lent Paul Amaro a thug and a pistol that had never been fired and could not be traced, but he was not without misgivings. He was a crook, a con man, a small operator with medium-sized ambitions; a murderer he was not. He had no special affection for Ziggy, but even so, he knew the man, had nothing personally against him, was unhappy being party to his demise. Maybe what he felt was nothing nobler than squeamishness; that, and a fear of being implicated in someone else's grudge—a grudge of which he neither knew nor cared to know the details. Still, a mocking little voice was telling him that maybe he'd been better off before getting into bed with these big-time hoods, his heroes; maybe peace of mind lay in remaining a pissant little second-rater hunkered in a shady garden in a pissant little town.

But that was idle thinking. He'd come this far, had Paul Amaro asking favors of him now—money in the bank. Saying no was not an option. He watched the two assassins head off to do their business.

Graciously, he put a second car and a second sweaty driver at the disposal of Paul Amaro's relative. Rose made her chauffeur drive the melting streets of town for an hour and a half, hoping that, among the tourists with their peeling noses and the locals with their worn-down sandals, she might spot her Louie. When she didn't, she had the flunkey drive her to the office of the local paper, the Key West Sentinel. She went inside a while, then was driven back to Flagler House where, over the weak objection of a mumbled promise she'd made to herself, she ordered a cocktail, and then another.

In the meantime all that had been found of Ziggy was a fresh and damning absence.

Paul Amaro and his new accomplice had climbed the softly rotting steps of his bungalow, their damp hands wrapped around the butts of guns held in their pockets. Salazar's thug, choosing the theatric, kicked in the front door, which had not been locked, and which sent forth wet and darkened splinters from the decayed wood at its edge. The living room was empty. Paul Amaro shook his head in some strange vindication at the stained furniture, the mildew on the ceiling; it pleased him that his enemy lived in squalor. Guns ready, they moved to the unpeopled kitchen, the abandoned bath. In the bedroom they saw the signs of a fast disorderly retreat. Dresser drawers stood open, dripping underwear and shirtsleeves. Shutters hung undecided, not open, not closed tightly, prepared for neither day nor night. The bed was unmade, the pillows crushed, the sheet whipped into pointy crests and troughs. Paul Amaro stared a moment at the guilty mattress but no scent or imprint told him that the bed's most recent tenant, naked and hopeful, had been his beloved daughter Angelina.